第60章 THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION(4)

He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road, Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp.Neither he nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest shelter for their household possessions.Hitherto life had moved them from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester, and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house, ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such as harbour the respectable middle classes of London.The house agents perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a "rushing" method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in a glowing halo of episcopal dignity."Take it or leave it," was the note of those gentlemen; "there are always people ready for houses." The line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop realized, is always to hold up and look scornful.The position of the land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is ultra-regal.It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are obliged to get down to the land somewhere.They cannot conduct business and rear families in the air.England's necessity is the landlord's opportunity....

Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer streak of socialism in his ideas."The church has been very remiss," he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement "breakfast room" of their twenty-seventh dismal possibility."It should have insisted far more than it has done upon the landlord's responsibility.No one should tolerate the offer of such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent people.It is unrighteous."At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice, the name of the offending landlord.

"It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of the railway," said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin."Lazy lot.Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything.Own some of the worst properties in London."Lady Ella saw things differently again."If you had stayed in the church," she said afterwards, "you might have helped to alter such things as that."At the time he had no answer.

"But," he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest Bloomsbury hotel, "if I had stayed in the church I should never have realized things like that."(4)

But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her stricken family.Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day.In one day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of the man who had been the centre of her life.Never was the whole world of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed.All the previous troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single item in this dismaying debacle.She tried to consolidate it in the idea that he was ill, "disordered." She assured herself that he would return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her ideas.It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from the church.She tried to argue with him and she found she could not argue.The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a dissentient proposition.

While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon a harsh hassock that hurt her knees.

Even in her prayers she could not argue nor vary.She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times: "Bring him back, dear Lord.Bring him back again."In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man, rather older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his purpose of leaving the church."I know you do not think with me in this," he said."I have to pray you to be patient with me.I have struggled with my conscience....For a time it means hardship, I know.

Poverty.But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull through.There are ways of doing my work.Perhaps we shall not have to undergo this cramping in this house for very long....""It is not the poverty I fear," said Lady Ella.